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Allan and Peg Miller purchased their first investment property two years
after graduating from college. Today, they own a small property
management company that includes 12 units in three buildings in the city. Surprisingly, they credit the success of their
small company to their telephone answering service!
“We bought our first rental property after we got married,”
recalled Allan. “It was a pretty run-down duplex. We lived in the upper unit and renovated it ourselves. Then, we
rented the remodeled upstairs unit, moved downstairs and began the
renovation process all over again on the second unit.
We enjoyed it and it provided us with a way to make some money on the side.”
Peg smiled and said, “We sold that
duplex after about a year and bought a four-plex.
We did the same thing, updating one unit at a time. Pretty soon we were
able to buy a second building, and then a third. By that time, things
were getting a little out of control.”
“It had always been a fun hobby for us; we never really planned on
running our own business. We’d both always found our jobs rewarding and
weren’t really interested in leaving our careers to become full-time
landlords,” said Allan. “By the time we had eleven tenants, we were
really getting stressed. It seemed like the property management was
taking over our lives Whenever a tenant had a service issue, we
were on call.”
“I told Allan it was time to sell,” said Peg. “But neither one of us
really wanted to do that. On the other hand, one of us was going to have
to run the business full-time if we were going to keep the buildings. It
was a stressful time for us.”
Fortunately for the Millers, a co-worker told Peg about the 24 hour
hotline that responded to service calls for her own apartment.
Initially, Peg dismissed the idea thinking that it would be impossible
for her to hire and manage staffers to answer the calls. Then, she
discovered how an answering service could make a difference.
“I was amazed that you could just hand off your calls – all those
headaches – to someone else. Best of all, you could hand them off to
trained professionals who could do more than just take a message.
Working with their staff, we developed a plan to take all the tenants’
service calls, any time of the day or night. Then, Allan and I negotiated
service contracts with some mechanical contractors – one plumber and one
electrician – to take the service calls tenants might have. The
telephone answering service
not only takes the calls, but dispatches the contractors! It was amazing.
Plus, they can screen calls for us when when run an ad for a new tenant!”
Peg and Allan both agree
that using the answering service was a turning point for their business.
“It was time to make a serious change. The phone calls for maintenance
got to be too much to handle. Plus, back then, we were performing most
of the maintenance ourselves. It was just too much,” said Allan.
“Today, we are much less stressed, and the service our
tenants are getting from our contractors is outstanding,” said Peg.
“The answering service made a tremendous difference in our lives.”
Learn more about telephone
answering services and discover how they might be able to help you.
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